As if the world needed to maintain some sort of equilibrium, the further East I traveled in Siberia, and the colder it got outside, the higher my internal temperature became. “Uh oh,” I thought, “… not a good time to get sick”. Let me digress.

I had already been traveling over 16 hours by the time I arrived in Barcelona to catch my overnight flight to Moscow. I was first on board, and as I feverishly floated and stumbled up the endless aisle, I felt I had wandered into a Stanley Kubrick film. The seats were bright blue, the bright orange seatbelts were crossed in perfect x’s. A beautiful young stewardess in a crisply pressed uniform wearing a stewardess cap directly out of the early sixties greeted me and waved her arm in welcome back towards the completely empty airplane. I was pretty sure she was going to say, “Welcome back, Mr. Cramer, we’ve been waiting for you”, and only then would I notice that the plane was filled with people wearing sinister masks and nodding in my direction. As I squeezed passed her I half expected she would smile and show rows of sharpened teeth. Luckily, it didn’t happen.

The surrealism continued. The plane filled with a variety of upwardly mobile Russians who could afford a vacation in Spain. It is a stereotype, I know, but I always feel that in any random group of Russians, someone is somehow connected to the Mafia, the ex-KGB or both. I’m bad. One gentleman, one of the biggest guys I have ever seen, had biceps bigger than my entire body and aura combined. Tattooed skulls up and down his arms matched the skulls on his t-shirt. He could have crushed me like a walnut, but I do not think I even appeared on his radar screen. I am pretty sure that just before boarding he had eaten The Terminator.

Exhausted, I hoped to sleep on the overnight flight. I dozed off for what must have been 45 minutes or so, and woke to a very lively group of Russians eating dinner, drinking, and being as merry as Russians could be in public with strangers around. They don’t “cotton’ to strangers very easily. This was all happening at the equivalent of 1:00 am. I sat up for awhile, ate, then went back to sleep. When I awoke the next time, the plane was completely dark and silent. Every passenger was now asleep, no exceptions. Even the stewardesses had disappeared. I am guessing that only the pilot and I were now awake, but for all I know he had bailed out long before. I walked back to the galley to get some water… no one. What made it weirder still was that all of the window shades were open and we were flying low over what I guessed was Poland. The inside of the plane was dark, but as I walked I could see the lights of towns and cities below out of both sides of the plane. I think I had left the Kubrick movie and was now in some animated Christmas horror film about Santa and his reindeer making their annual deliveries. Hey, I was feverish. Cut me some slack.

I went back to my seat, fell asleep again, dreaming about lost luggage. This was absolutely the longest four- hour flight I have ever taken. Miraculously, we landed in Moscow. It was planet Earth, but all the rules seemed slightly different. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, “Cyrillic, what’s up with that?” Not only does no one at Russian information booths ever smile, they seem to be mad that you disturbed them by having to ask a question, or that you are an idiot for not knowing how to get to Terminal D. They will look up, say the words Terminal D once, and point. After that it is just pointing. Go away.

My trip was far from over… I think the whole thing eventually took me 34 hours. After Moscow, I still had to fly to Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia and historical center of the Communist Gulag. This is the place where people went and did not come back. When I agreed to go I had some vague image in my mind of where it was… sure, there is Moscow, then the Ural Mountains, and then Siberia… no problem. Later I looked in an Atlas. Starting with Moscow I slowly moved my finger to the right on the map page…hmmm., funny, where is it… then my finger came to the edge of the page… uh oh… I turned the page and my finger kept moving further and further to the right until finally, just north of the border with Mongolia and Kazakhstan… about as far as you can get from anywhere, Novosibirsk. Too late. I had promised.  

The passengers on this flight were different than the flight into Moscow. These were the salt-of-the-earth Russians, maybe a little above the median since they were flying over rather than taking the three-day train-trip through Siberia, but still, just regular people who had the misfortune of needing to go to Siberia in winter.

Some very noticeable things about this crowd, well, noticeable to me because the landscapes of my mind’s interior can be rather odd… Russian men have really big heads. How big? I spent a lot of time on the flight marveling at the size of the average head and trying to come up with some image that could give you a sense of what I mean. Disclaimer: I have a big head (Russian ancestry) and I am used to people sitting down behind me in a movie theater and hear one whispering to the other, “He has a big head” before changing their seats. These heads were a quantum leap passed that. They could block out the sun. If one of them were honored with a place on Mt. Rushmore, there would be a small plaque at the bottom saying, “Actual Size.”

More salient observations; Observation One… if you added them all up, there were fewer necks on the plane than heads. Observation Two… When the heat is on in Russia, it’s on Full. No one says a word. They suffer, but remain silent for hours. I do not think there is anyone to tell who would listen anyway. They would just shrug and say, so what do you want me to do? If you don’t like it, go a different way. I flew on four seemingly endless Aeroflot flights. They were all the same. Seeds of Revolution.

I had selected a window seat so I could get a sense of Siberia before I landed. The best way to describe it is to make a list of landscape features; lakes, rivers, forests, mountains, fields, tundra, plains… you get the idea… and then put the word frozen in front of each of them. The vastness of it (and put the word “frozen” in front of “vastness”) gave me an even greater appreciation for the Mongols who somehow crossed it on horseback in the 14th century to invade Europe. Those must have been some tough hombres.

When I walked out of the airport in Novosibirsk, I recognized at once that Siberia’s reputation for bitter cold was well deserved. How cold was it? The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle postulates that at the sub-atomic level it is impossible to predict a particles behavior. This universal principle does not apply in the Siberian winter since every particle is frozen in place. You know exactly where it is. It’s not going anywhere.
The only reason to want it to be this cold is if you live downwind of a frozen Wooly Mammoth carcass. I am guessing Siberian real estate agents often use that as a selling point.

Novosibirsk, now a city of 1.5 million, the third largest in Russia, owes its existence to a Trans-Siberian railway bridge over the river Ob. If you had to get from one side of the country to the other, you had to pass through Novosibirsk. The city was selected as the administrative center of Siberia and of the vast Communist Gulag prison system because of its strategic location, and believe it or not, its temperate climate. True, it is a bit of a stretch to say that the city lies inside some sort of Siberian banana belt, but all things being relative, the slightest difference in such harsh conditions is a big difference. Difficult to imagine when one is walking down the street and a big sign tells you it is -18 degrees Celsius. I am not sure how that exactly translates into Fahrenheit, but I do not think I want to know.

As an aside (and this is such a “humans do not consider unintended consequences” aside), the rapid growth of the city required a major hydroelectric station, which required the creation of a giant water reservoir, now known as the Ob Sea. As a direct result of the station's construction vast areas of fertile land and virgin forests were flooded and the new open space created by the reservoir's surface caused average wind speeds to double. Thank you very much. As another aside, you would think the name Ob would be easy to pronounce, even by an American. You would be wrong.

There are so many other things to say about this place… some of the most interesting faces you will see anywhere on the planet. It’s a tough life and you can read the weather in the lines around their eyes. And then, of course, are the women. Just between us “people who are attracted to women,” the 1 to 10-scale was created with the understanding that the average looking person is, by definition, a five. The “average” Siberian woman (between the ages of 20 and 30) is an 8. Throws the whole scale out of balance. I am not complaining.

This beautiful woman thing brings me to the subject of Svetlana… but that will need a whole other blog post. Thanks for making it this far. On to Barcelona.